Reports
01.31.03
China-U.S. Relations
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, U.S. and PRC foreign policy calculations appear to be changing. The Administration of George W. Bush assumed office in January 2001 viewing China as a U.S. “strategic...
The NYRB China Archive
01.27.03China’s Psychiatric Terror
from New York Review of Books
1.At its triennial congress in Yokohama last September, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) overwhelmingly voted to send a delegation to China to investigate charges that dissidents were being imprisoned and maltreated as “political maniacs”...
Reports
01.23.03
Is Chinese Military Modernization a Threat to the United States?
Cato Institute
Both the Pentagon and a congressionally mandated commission recently issued studies on the Chinese military that overstated the threat to the United States posed by that force. In contrast, this paper attempts to place the modernizing Chinese...
Reports
01.01.03
Fuel Cell Vehicle Development in China
Sara Segal-Williams
Natural Resources Defense Council
Hydrogen fuel cells (FCs) are one of the most promising new technologies of the twenty-first century for electricity generation. Because a fuel cell directly converts the chemical energy of hydrogen fuel to electrical energy without burning the fuel...
Reports
10.17.02
Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), FreeTrade, and the 2002 Summit in Mexico
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
On October 26-27, 2002, the Tenth APEC Leaders’ Meeting (summit) is to be hosted by Mexico in Las Cabos, Mexico. APEC 2002 is intended to send a clear message to the world that APEC has the ability to implement its initiatives while responding and...
The NYRB China Archive
10.10.02China’s New Rulers: What They Want
from New York Review of Books
Following are the members of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee, whose election is expected in November 2002, listed by their rank according to protocol, with their main Party and future state positions. Ages are given as of...
The NYRB China Archive
09.26.02Taking Rights Seriously in Beijing
from New York Review of Books
Last May I was invited to China for two weeks, first to take part in a two-day conference at the law school of Tsinghua University in Beijing, and then to give several public lectures there and in other cities. The Tsinghua conference was arranged...
The NYRB China Archive
09.26.02China’s New Rulers: The Path to Power
from New York Review of Books
Following are the members of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee, whose election is expected in November 2002, listed by their rank according to protocol, with their main Party and future state positions. Ages are given as of...
The NYRB China Archive
05.23.02There Were Worse Places
from New York Review of Books
In the mid-1980s I made occasional trips to Harbin in Manchuria to report on the Orthodox White Russians who lived there, the remnant of a community that had fled from the new Soviet Union after the revolution. There were once so many of them that...
The NYRB China Archive
04.11.02
China: The Anaconda in the Chandelier
from New York Review of Books
In China’s Mao years you could be detained and persecuted for talking with your neighbor about your cat. The Chinese word for “cat” (mao, high level tone) is a near homonym for the name of the Great Leader (mao, rising tone), and a tip to the police...
Reports
12.31.01
Economics of Malaria Control in China
Luo Xiaoyuan
World Health Organization
Government finance for healthcare in China declined during the 1990s. This coincided with the entry of Henan Province (population 90 million) into the consolidation phase of malaria control (in 1993), after a successful effort over the previous 25...
The NYRB China Archive
12.20.01Inside the Whale
from New York Review of Books
Ian Buruma is a powerful storyteller and much of his story about Chinese rebels is very sad. This sadness persists throughout his long journey, starting in the United States, where he met most of the well-known dissident Chinese exiles, and ending...
Reports
12.17.01
China’s Relations with Central Asian States and Problems with Terrorism
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
Over a number of years, the United States has been actively engaged in efforts to improve human rights conditions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). However, some analysts suggest that the events of September 11, 2001, may make it more...
Reports
10.26.01
Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), Free Trade, and the 2001 Summit in Shanghai
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
On October 20-21, 2001, the Ninth APEC Leaders’ Meeting (summit) was hosted by China in Shanghai. The theme for APEC 2001 was “Meeting New Challenges in the New Century: Achieving Common Prosperity through Participation and Cooperation” with the sub...
The NYRB China Archive
10.18.01China’s Assault on the Environment
from New York Review of Books
In 1956 Chairman Mao wrote the poem “Swimming,” about a dam to be built across the Yangtze River. This is its second stanza:A magnificent project is formed. The Bridge, it flies! Spanning North and South, and a Natural Barrier becomes a thoroughfare...
The NYRB China Archive
10.04.01The Muslims of Tibet
from New York Review of Books
Jamyang Norbu, writes in response to Ian Buruma’s article “Tibet Disenchanted” and Buruma replies.
Reports
10.01.01
Beginning the Journey: China, the United States, and the WTO
Elizabeth Economy
Council on Foreign Relations
The main finding of this report is that both the United States and China will run risks as Beijing moves ahead with membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), but the potential payoffs for both countries are well worth it. It also points out...
The NYRB China Archive
05.17.01Un-Chinese Activities
from New York Review of Books
In the first week of November 1728, China’s Emperor Yongzheng (who reigned between 1723 and 1735) ruled over something like 200 million people and the vast territory that Beijing today claims as the People’s Republic. He had plenty on his mind. He...
The NYRB China Archive
05.17.01On the Road
from New York Review of Books
Books that “follow in the steps of” a well-known traveler are more and more ubiquitous these days, but many of them are slightly suspect. Following in the footsteps of some distinguished predecessor can look a little like a gesture of defeat,...
Reports
04.01.01
Women and Land Tenure in China: A Study of Women’s Land Rights in Dongfang County, Hainan Province
Landesa
This report discusses women’s rights to land in China. The report is based on field research conducted in January 2000 in the city of Dongfang in the Hainan Province. It finds that granting women in China legal rights to land is unlikely to...
Reports
03.12.01
Evolution of the “One China” Policy
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
On July 9, 1999, questions about the “one China” policy arose again after Lee Teng-hui, then-President of Taiwan, characterized cross-strait relations as “special state-to-state ties.” The Clinton Administration responded that Lee’s statement was...
The NYRB China Archive
03.08.01Writers in a Cold Wind
from New York Review of Books
Early in 1979 the Chinese officials in charge of culture declared that the Maoist ban on nineteen traditional classics and sixteen foreign works, including Anna Karenina, was lifted. On the day the books became available at a Beijing bookshop, a...
The NYRB China Archive
07.20.00
Tibet Disenchanted
from New York Review of Books
The first time I visited Tibet, in the fall of 1982, scars of the Maoist years were still plain to see: Buddhist wall paintings in temples and monasteries were scratched out or daubed with revolutionary slogans. Now that new winds are blowing, these...
The NYRB China Archive
06.29.00‘Taiwan Stands Up’
from New York Review of Books
Politics in Taiwan is a deadly business, sometimes literally. Chen Shui-bian’s first public act, on the morning of his inauguration as president on May 20, was to carry his wife in his arms to their waiting car. In 1985 she had been run down by a...
The NYRB China Archive
06.29.00
Found Horizon
from New York Review of Books
Traveling recently by bus from Shigatse to Lhasa, squeezed in between a heavily made-up bar hostess from Sichuan who was vomiting her breakfast out the window and a minor Tibetan official in a shiny brown suit who asked me about Manchester United...
The NYRB China Archive
05.11.00China’s Dirty Clean-Up
from New York Review of Books
Every year, millions of China’s poorest and most vulnerable people are arrested on the streets of the nation’s cities merely because the way they look or speak identifies them clearly as “outsiders,” not native to the city in question, or because...
Reports
05.01.00
Sustainable Development and the Open-Door Policy in China
He Jianan
Council on Foreign Relations
This paper argues that political discourse in China reflects the larger intellectual conflicts familiar in the West. Most decisions of policy are rooted in conditions and struggles inside China, and reflect both continuity and change in internal...
The NYRB China Archive
04.27.00A Lamas’ Who’s Who
from New York Review of Books
A one-l lama, he’s a priest. A two-l llama, he’s a beast. And I will bet a silk pajama, There isn’t any three-l lllama. —Ogden NashThe only Tibetan lama most Westerners knew of until recently was the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the genial Nobel Prize...
Reports
04.24.00
China’s Long March to a Market Economy
Cato Institute
The U.S. Congress is in the historic position of being able to help pro-reform leaders in China move their country in a market-oriented direction. A vote to grant China permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status will bolster the position of...
Reports
04.01.00
China, Nuclear Weapons, and Arms Control
He Jianan
Council on Foreign Relations
The U.S.-PRC bilateral agenda is loaded with many contentious issues, including trade relations, human rights, regional security, and nonproliferation. During the last year or two, another issue has emerged: the strategic military dimension of the...
The NYRB China Archive
03.23.00
East Is West
from New York Review of Books
Chang-rae Lee has an extraordinary talent for describing violence. Here is his account of the gang rape and murder of a Korean sex slave (“comfort woman”) in a Japanese army camp during World War II:I ran up the north path by the latrines, toward...
Reports
03.01.00
The United States, Japan, and China: Setting the Course
He Jianan
Council on Foreign Relations
During the twentieth century, as the United States grew into a world power, Americans confronted two major powers in Asia: China and Japan. Asia expert Neil Silver argues that the United States never had good relations simultaneously with China and...
The NYRB China Archive
02.24.00
Divine Killer
from New York Review of Books
“If there was anything Mao wouldn’t want to see, it was tears. Mao said on one occasion, ‘I can’t bear to see poor people cry. When I see their tears, I can’t hold back my own.’ “Another thing which upset Mao was bloodshed.” —From Mao Zedong: Man,...
Reports
02.01.00
The Joint Stock Share System in China’s Nanhai County
Landesa
Between 1979 and 1983, China made the dramatic transition from a socialist agriculture dominated by large collective farms to a more market-oriented agriculture dominated by small family farms. This report describes the experiment’s background in...
The NYRB China Archive
11.04.99Misfortune in Shanghai
from New York Review of Books
Connoisseurs of traditional Peking opera would have enjoyed the recent meeting in Shanghai sponsored by Fortune to consider “China: The Next 50 Years.” The audience of approximately three hundred CEOs of US and other companies and over a dozen...
The NYRB China Archive
11.04.99
China in Cyberspace
from New York Review of Books
It is not widely known that the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan are now at war. The battles are not being fought on land, however, or at sea, or even, strictly speaking, in the air; they take place in cyberspace, where nobody so far has ever...
The NYRB China Archive
10.21.99Room at the Top
from New York Review of Books
The last time I was in the Himalayas, I met a young, highly Westernized Tibetan who, misled perhaps by my Indian features (born in England, I’ve never lived in the subcontinent), started talking to me about the strange ways of the exotic foreigners...
The NYRB China Archive
09.23.99
The Jiang Zemin Mystery
from New York Review of Books
Since the Chinese Communist Party leaders will not allow themselves to be criticized in the press or on television, critics have had to find other means to express their political grievances. Historically speaking, one of the most telling ways to...
Reports
07.19.99
Trade and the Transformation of China
Cato Institute
Congress will soon consider whether to revoke normal trade relations (NTR) with China and then, possibly in the fall, whether to make NTR permanent as part of China’s anticipated entry into the World Trade Organization. The consequences of...
The NYRB China Archive
06.10.99The Dalai Lama on Succession and on the CIA
from New York Review of Books
This year is the fortieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet into Indian exile. He is sixty-five and some day even god-kings must die. But in the eyes of Tibetans he is also the fourteenth incarnation of the first Dalai Lama, who died...
The NYRB China Archive
04.08.99Message from Shangri-La
from New York Review of Books
On October 6, 1939, on the outskirts of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, Hugh Richardson, who is now ninety-three and the West’s foremost living Tibetanist, saw the arrival in the city of the five-year-old boy who in early 1940 would be installed as the...
The NYRB China Archive
03.18.99Talking with Mao: An Exchange
from New York Review of Books
In response to:Kissinger & the Emperor from the March 4, 1999 issueTo the Editors:No China scholar has influenced my own thinking more than Jonathan Spence. My comments on his review of The Kissinger Transcripts edited by William Burr [NYR,...
The NYRB China Archive
03.04.99Kissinger & the Emperor
from New York Review of Books
From the moment when they first began to keep historical records, the Chinese showed a fascination with the complexities of diplomacy, with the give-and-take of interstate negotiation, the balancing of force and bluff, the variable powers of human...
The NYRB China Archive
02.04.99
Sex and Democracy in Taiwan
from New York Review of Books
Fairly or not, sex scandals in politics have acquired a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon ring. The French boast of taking a more sophisticated view of the private lives of public men—that is to say, those lives are shielded from public scrutiny. Germans smack...
The NYRB China Archive
08.13.98Democratic Vistas?
from New York Review of Books
In August 1980 Deng Xiaoping laid down the Communist Party’s view of democracy. It continues to cripple China and is used both inside the country and by its apologists abroad to avoid the issue of repression. Deng said:
Democracy without...
The NYRB China Archive
05.28.98Goodfellas in Shanghai
from New York Review of Books
Just over two thousand years ago, China’s first great historian, Sima Qian, decided to include a chapter on assassins in his long history of his newly united homeland. He chose five men as representative examples of those who had tried to kill...
The NYRB China Archive
03.05.98Talking with Wei Jingsheng
from New York Review of Books
Speaking to a small group in London this January, nearly two months after he was expelled from China, the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng told his somewhat startled listeners, “The earliest human rights movement in the world was the ‘People’s...
The NYRB China Archive
02.05.98The Mark of Cain
from New York Review of Books
1.In Hong Kong’s China Club, fashionable people have lunch beneath pictures of Mao Zedong after a drink in the Long March Bar. Most of the members are refugees from Mao or the children of refugees. In Russia, or Germany, or Cambodia, there is surely...
The NYRB China Archive
01.15.98Lost Horizons
from New York Review of Books
Tibet has always cast a dangerously strong spell upon visitors from abroad. When the first major European expedition marched on Lhasa in 1904, led by Colonel Younghusband at the behest of his old friend Lord Curzon, it ended up slaughtering in just...
The NYRB China Archive
09.25.97Betrayal
from New York Review of Books
It is unusual in British political life for a high official to leave his position and immediately reveal in his own words or through an intermediary what in his opinion really happened while he was in office. Furthermore, unless he has been roughly...
The NYRB China Archive
08.14.97
Selling Out Hong Kong
from New York Review of Books
And so it finally came to pass, at midnight, June 30, 1997, in the brand-new Hong Kong convention center, resembling, local people say, a giant cockroach: the red flag of the People’s Republic of China, snapping in the breeze of wind machines, went...
The NYRB China Archive
06.12.97
Holding Out in Hong Kong
from New York Review of Books
Flicking through the April issue of the Hong Kong Tatler, a glossy high life magazine modeled after the London Tatler, I was reminded of a story I once heard about the Rothschild house in Paris. When Victor Rothschild visited the Avenue de Marigny...
The NYRB China Archive
06.12.97Peking’s Choice
from New York Review of Books
The recent sentence to six years in prison of one of Tibet’s supreme monks shows Peking’s determination to dominate all events in the region and bring to an end a period of intense confusion within the Chinese Communist Party. For a brief time the...
The NYRB China Archive
04.24.97Peking, Hong Kong, & the U.S.
from New York Review of Books
No recent book has blown a bigger hole in the proposition that the US must follow a policy of “positive engagement” with China than The Coming Conflict with China. It is a mark of the wound they inflicted on Peking that the authors, ex-reporters in...
The NYRB China Archive
04.10.97What Confucius Said
from New York Review of Books
1.The first Western-language version of Confucius’ sayings—later known as the Analects—was published in Paris in 1687, in Latin, under the title Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, with a brief dedication to King Louis XIV, thanking him for supporting...
Reports
04.01.97
Shaping U.S.-China Relations
He Jianan
Council on Foreign Relations
An increasingly contentious debate has erupted in the United States over how to respond to the rise of China. Figuring out a successful policy toward China is no easy task, but any sound strategy must be rooted in a sense of history. A sure recipe...
The NYRB China Archive
03.27.97Demolition Man
from New York Review of Books
Deng Xiaoping was eulogized by his colleagues as the “chief architect” of China’s reform program and its opening to the outside world.1 This was misleading. Deng was no master builder. Unlike his patron, Mao Zedong, and fortunately for his...
The NYRB China Archive
01.09.97
China: The Defining Moment
from New York Review of Books
The evolution of the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949 has been tumultuous and bloody, and marked by the suffering of millions. It has been anything but peaceful. Yet it is precisely the prospect of “peaceful evolution,” which in...
The NYRB China Archive
12.19.96The Risks of Witness
from New York Review of Books
With this, the third book that Harry Wu has published about China’s forced-labor prison camp system, we can see that he has been moving on a discernible trajectory, one that has taken him from the world of reality to the world of appearance. In this...
The NYRB China Archive
10.17.96The Hope for China
from New York Review of Books
1.“Some people,” declared Mao Zedong in 1959, “say that we have become isolated from the masses.”1 By “some people” Mao meant Peng Dehuai, a subordinate who had dared to criticize Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” which was just then creating in China the...